


Of Mirrors and Kaleidoscopes

by lemurious



Category: Wayward Children Series - Seanan McGuire
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Hope, Light Angst, Synesthesia, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:41:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28106448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemurious/pseuds/lemurious
Summary: One day, Sumi's door opens right in the middle of Eleanor West's parlor, only to let in a future version of herself, half out of her mind with worry, and Sumi is suddenly asked to go on a quest. Fortunately, Nancy tags along.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Of Mirrors and Kaleidoscopes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Seawitchkaraoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seawitchkaraoke/gifts).



> Dear Recipient, happy Yuletide and thank you so very much for letting me live in the world of the Wayward Children for a while! I hope you enjoy your gift! <3 <3

When Sumi heard that her classmates had been _called_ by their doors, she was disappointed to realize that they meant a sudden desire to walk down to one specific corner of the cellar or an urge to rummage in an old trunk up in the attic until its bottom revealed a secret staircase.

Not so for her. She actually, literally _, heard the call_ , in colors bursting in front of her eyes - cheery yellow violins, string instruments in every shade of blue, palest grey guitars and the deepest reds of the drums, an entire orchestra in a rainbow.

She could see sounds and hear colors for as long as she remembered, but the two rarely matched, causing a cacophony in her head that she only managed to quench by dressing in the dullest greys and by playing endless scales on her violin.

Of course, that was before Confection. Afterwards, thank Nonsense for small mercies, the sounds and colors continued in relative harmony.

The melody of Ely West was _just_ a half-tone off, and sometimes the house _almost_ felt like home, with the bronze glimmer of the creaky stairs, the calming buzz of the prismatic lampshades. Sometimes Sumi felt so close to her world that she got into the habit of walking the floors every night, half expecting to hear the wind chimes synchronize into the clear, pure tune of invitation that she had heard when her door had opened.

When her door _actually_ reappeared, beyond all hopes but the most painful, Sumi could not even rush through it, because she was knocked on her butt by what looked like her very own self careening into her, and, as if that was not confusing enough even for a hardcore Nonsense dweller, was scolded in the most derogatory fashion.

“You! Me, I mean. Let’s not make it longer than it needs to be. You are me, and I am you, and neither of us would be _us_ if you did not jump through the door, which, apparently, now we are refusing to do, so I need you to go back and shake some sense into ourselves! Right _now!_ ”

Sumi’s head was spinning. “What? Who? First, apologize. Then, calm down and tell me what and who exactly you are.”

The intruder completely ignored the request for apologies. “I am you, obviously, or rather, I am who you will become, one day.

“Right now I should be plowing the fields of candy corn, forever and happily ever after, except that there will be no corn to plow nor their farmers to kiss in the middle of the molasses storm if I – you – we – have not walked through our very first door. Which we, apparently, now are not going to do, making both of us disappear, poof and not even a gust of flour to accompany us because there would be no Confection. Not for us. So I need you to get back and convince us to go through that door. You can use this one, it lets you ride a swirl of lollipop until spitting you out right at the moment of your past.”

“Can’t _you_ go instead?”

“Not close enough. See, I am far enough in the future that I _was_ sure already, and got claimed by Confection, my gingerbread heart twice-baked in its oven. You, on the other hand, have been sent back to this world, to _be_ sure, so you are not as far removed from who we both once used to be and have tried hard to forget ever since. Goodbye, half-baked self! Make ourselves proud!”

After this thoroughly incomplete explanation, Sumi-from-the-future pulled Sumi’s-in-the-house braids hard enough to hurt, stepped back through the door - _her_ door, leading to _her home_ and disappeared.

The swirls on the door had changed, unlikely to lead back to Confection, but, after all, here was a chance to break a rule, jingling bright strawberry and teal in front of her, and how could she pass it by? Not to mention that there might be a world to save.

“That is the loudest silence I have ever heard you make,” a voice came from behind her.

Nancy usually ignored voices, considering them to be the clatter of the living, and Sumi seemed to be the most _alive_ of them all, and the noisiest by far. But this silence cut through her habitual ruckus like a plane leaving a trail in the summer sky.

“What do you say to an adventure, ghostie-girl?” Sumi ignored Nancy’s question and was already motioning to a strange round door, painted in clashing colors that hurt Nancy’s eyes. “Not home, not yet, but there’s one cookie out there that needs just a little more chocolate chip and less raisin, if you know what I mean.”

“You sound utterly nonsensical,” responded Nancy, turning her back on that impossibly loud door. “But, well, nonsense is what you deal with, so all I can do is trust you, I suppose.”

“And do you really?” Sumi’s dancing face momentarily turned into a statue.

“Trust you? Yes,” Nancy did not realize how sure of it she was until she said it without thinking. “I may not _understand_ you, but I _do_ trust you. At least, to make the kind of choices you can live with.”

“Which is exactly the point, because I need to convince my pre-Confection self to make a choice that would allow me not only to live _with_ it, but to live _at all._ I need to drag her through the door, kicking and screaming more likely than not, we may have to find some treacle to muffle her, or else I would not exist. Not really. Not _me._ And,” Sumi added as an afterthought, only her eyes, with no trace of humor in them, betraying how important it was for her, “there would be no revolution in Confection, and they wouldn’t even know what they’re missing.”

After a few more minutes of the garbled explanation Nancy decided that, well, she really had nowhere else to be at the moment. _Except home_ , but that was not an option and in any case only made her stomach hurt. Also, if she had to be honest with herself, she just wanted the feeling of going through a door - any door - to enter a world which, even if it had not been made for her, would have been made for _someone_ , to fit them and love them and let them become who they have always been.

“Lead on,” she said, and Sumi let out a whoop that must have awakened half the house, grabbed Nancy by the hand and pulled her right _into_ the lollipop door, whose stripes expanded to swallow both girls, and down and down they went, until the stripes squeezed, shuddered and spat them out like toothpaste from a tube, which was a very apt analogy, Nancy thought, since they had ended up in someone’s bathroom. All gleaming whites and pale pinks and nothing that could signal who the owner of the bathroom was. Not even a stray toothbrush.

  
Sumi, who had so gleefully dragged Nancy through the door, now seemed to have lost all her exuberance. She was looking at the door, hands clenched at her sides.

“I have forgotten what awful din these tiles used to make,” she said. “How difficult it was to shut them off. How – how _lonely_ they were, I can just _taste_ the feeling of fading into the floors and the walls – “ Sumi was rambling now, eyes unfocused.

Nancy gently touched her shoulder, and, when Sumi leaned into the touch as if it was the only non-painful part of the world, turned Sumi towards the mirror above the sink.

“Look at yourself. This is you. The ribbons and the bracelets and that disgustingly shabby pink feather boa, though I will not be sad to see the last of it. This is who you are, not whoever used to live in this apartment and wanted to fade into the tiles. You don’t have a _chance_ of fading, just look at yourself,” she said.

Sumi felt more than heard the _click_ when her forced focus on the colors on her bracelets finally became the familiar harmony of the rainbow.

“I feel like I’ve seen a real ghost, ghostie-girl,” she said. “Thank you for bringing me back.”

The lack of rhyme and melody in Sumi’s voice made Nancy rather uneasy. “Would you like to go back for a bit and try again another night?” she asked, hoping that Sumi might be able to deal with this adventure better if she were able to get some rest.

“Judging from how terrified my future self was, there may not _be_ another night,” Sumi replied, her voice regaining a little of the rhythm, though still entirely too quiet. “Well, no amount of staring at the dough is going to make it rise,” she then declared with finality and pushed open the door.

They walked into a very ordinary, very tidy, very monochrome bedroom with a very ordinary, very tidy, very monochrome girl sitting at her table and staring into a kaleidoscope pattern hovering in the air in front of her with sheer brutal anger in her eyes.

Sumi, face set, fists clenched, was at the girl’s side in a couple of strides.

“You complete idiot,” she sneered. “You are endangering me – and I, mind you, am the amazing magic Technicolor version of you – and risking an entire kingdom to boot. Jump through! I did, after all.”

The girl turned to look at Sumi, the anger in her gaze not diminishing by even a fraction. She was dressed in a pale grey uniform, her hair neatly brushed, not a single piece of jewelry on her – Nancy would never be able to recognize her as Sumi if not for the willful set of their mouths.

“And what difference does that make?” the girl asked in a determined voice. Entirely too determined for – how old must she be, twelve? “How will it help me?”

“Did I really use to be this stupid? It will help you because it will help _me,_ and the person who we will both become. It will help us live!”

“Some may say living ain’t all it’s been cracked up to be.”

Sumi, exasperated beyond words, violently shook her colorful bangles into the face of Not-yet-Sumi, as Nancy decided to call the younger girl, and changed her tactics to begging, which did not sound convincing even to Nancy, much less so to Not-yet-Sumi.

“You can save an entire world from tyranny,” she began.

“I am currently being groomed to become a tyrant, and have not yet decided whether I would enjoy it,” Not-yet-Sumi retorted, and Nancy could almost see Sumi – _her_ Sumi, the one who took her under her flamboyant wing and made sure she could wear the clothes that fit who she was – start to fade into the background.

She imagined being in Sumi’s position and realized that it was hard to envision a worse enemy than a 12-year-old version of yourself.

Not-yet-Sumi clearly would not choose to jump into that twirling kaleidoscope into which Sumi was looking with such _yearning_ that it broke Nancy’s heart, out of duty, nor out of compassion. But the door was here, so the possibility remained, Nancy only needed to guess the key.

“When I went through my own door,” she said, ignoring Not-yet-Sumi’s “and who in the world are _you_? Can’t be another version of me, you’re like two heads taller than the other one!” -“the best and the scariest and the hardest part of all, and the one I miss the most, every day, every breath sometimes, was how _unpredictable_ it was. How nothing I had done before had prepared me for it, and how nobody _expected_ me to be prepared, or, well, even _good_ at what I did. They only expected me to _try_ , with all my heart.”

That’s how heroes are made, Nancy thought. From kids who forget themselves when they fall in love with the world that they would risk anything to save. Sometimes they even succeed.

And apparently, her Sumi _did_ succeed, and now she was doing everything to keep herself from jumping straight through her doorway so that Not-yet-Sumi could do it instead. Because otherwise her world might suffer, even if Sumi got a chance to go home.

The anger in Not-yet-Sumi’s eyes was getting slowly replaced by an incredulous sort of curiosity.

One last push, Nancy thought, and please, _please_ , let it work this time, before Sumi falls apart with the pain and the longing and the regret. “Well, in the end, what exactly do you have to lose?”

Not-yet-Sumi spat a bitter response. “All my life people have expected me to never lose. To practice, and learn, and work, until I could waltz in and take the prize, in violin, or math, or ASL, you name it. I _already_ know which college I will go to, followed by which business school, and in which year I will inherit the empire.”

“But you have never known what it is like to try, to truly _try_ for something more important than - than _you_ are.” That was Sumi, recovered, ready to bedazzle Not-yet-Sumi, her eyes ablaze, the shabby feathers of her boa, for a moment, aflutter in wings.

Not-yet-Sumi stood up, pushed aside her chair, and, after a perfunctory glance at Sumi and Nancy holding their breaths in hope, calmly climbed up on her table and stepped right into the kaleidoscope.

The colors twirled up one last time and slowly faded away, and Nancy and Sumi were alone in the room.

Sumi smiled even as tears threatened to spill out of her eyes.

“Don’t I have the most beautiful portal? It looked like an entire _choir_ of angels crossed with your favorite boy band! Oh, let’s go back and never mention this again, except in yambic couplets over breakfast. I have forgotten how _difficult_ I used to be at twelve.”

They held hands as they stepped back through the portal, right into their bedroom, drenched in the moonlight that sang a clear melody in Sumi’s mind.

Not-yet-Sumi was about to trip over her own feet the first time she would be given a sword and told to parry, and later, she would fall in love, and cry over a grave, and save a kingdom, and learn what it was like to be a hero in Confection. And Sumi – well, Sumi would have to try to remember how to be one here, for a while.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote Sumi with the kind of synesthesia that I have myself - I am aware it comes in different forms though, and it is in no way universal.
> 
> Kudos and comments are always very much appreciated :)


End file.
